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Street Scene
Music by Kurt Weill • Book by Elmer Rice
Lyrics by Langston Hughes
Concert Performance at the Hollywood Bowl, 1949
Recorded for overseas broadcast by Armed Forces Radio

There are many things to cheer about Kurt
Weill and the varied career he led in the
American musical theatre, but the sheer
unpredictability of it all is what proves most
electrifying.

And nothing was more surprising than the
creative leap he took that found him writing
1947’s Street Scene.

A man who started out in Germany with
Bertolt Brecht, penning works such as TheThreepenny Opera, began his Stateside career
with a harshly political piece such as JohnnyJohnson, reminiscent of his European shows.

But then came Knickerbocker Holiday,
which kept the politics, but lightened the
mood, to be followed by the elegant frippery
of Lady in the Dark, the gossamer
sophistication of One Touch of Venus and the
frankly outdated operetta of The Firebrand ofFlorence.

It was after the failure of the last work, in
fact, that Weill was reminded of how moved he
had been by seeing a Berlin production of
Street Scene, Elmer Rice’s 1929 Pulitzer Prize
winning drama of life in the slums on the East
Side of Manhattan.

In fact, he had approached the testy and
egomaniacal Rice years before with his request,
only to be told that “Whatever prestige value
there would be in a successful musical version
would accrue primarily to the composer.”

Still, Weill continued to pursue Rice, who—riding high on the success of his 1945 hit,
Dream Girl—finally decided to agree to the
composer’s proposal.

As lyricist, Weill brought on black poet
Langston Hughes, who had no credits as a
Broadway lyricist up to that point. He
collaborated beautifully with Weill and some of
their combined works written for the show
such as Lonely House, What Good Would
the Moon Be? and Somehow I Never Could
Believe have a unique beauty.

Weill himself felt that the score contained
some of his greatest writing and once proudly
predicted that “Seventy-five years from now,
Street Scene will be remembered as my major
work.”

Alas, that’s not the case, despite the musical
and dramatic richness which fill the piece. The
fact that it never truly succeeded can be traced
partially to the antipathy that grew up among its three collaborators (Weill, Rice and lyricist
Langston Hughes), which stopped the work
from achieving the seamless unity it needed.

Rice felt that his original play was near
perfection and didn’t want many changes made
to it at all, no matter how long and how
passionately Weill argued with him about the
differences between drama and musicals.

Every time Weill or Hughes would argue
that a cut had to be made in the text to make
room for the musical numbers, Rice would dig
his heels in, proclaiming, “Now that was a
celebrated line!”

Eventually, however, they worked out some
kind of compromise which allowed them to
finish their labours.

But then, the battle had just begun. Rice
was as penurious as he was contentious and
was reluctant to allow substantial financial
control to any conventional Broadway
producer.

Finally, the once-powerful Dwight Deere
Wiman, now near the end of his career, took
over the nominal leadership reins, allowing The
Playwrights’ Company (of which Rice was a
charter member) to actually control the
production.

Strong directors that Weill favoured, such as
Rouben Mamoulian, were eventually vetoed by
Rice and the relatively low-key Charles
Friedman staged the show.

Battles continued over casting, with Weill
wanting strong voices in all the roles. He won
in some important cases, such as getting New
York City opera star Polyna Stoska (heard on
this 1949 concert performance from the
Hollywood Bowl) to play the leading role of
tortured wife Anna Maurrant. Irish-American
tenor Brian Sullivan, also heard on this
recording, was a late cast replacement.

In fact, many of the cast found themselves
being made expendable during the contentious
rehearsal process as opera singers proved to be
weak actors and vice versa.

Some of the sturdier survivors were then-ingenue
Anne Jeffreys, who went on to play
leading roles in later shows such as Kiss Me,Kate, and juvenile Danny Daniels, who
emerged in the 1950s as a talented and long-lasting
choreographer.

But after the show’s opening on 9 January
1947, it looked like all the work had been
worth the effort. The reviews were largely
dazzling, headed by Brooks Atkinson in TheNew York Times, who called it “a musical play
of magnificence and glory.”

Yet somehow, the show failed to capture the
public’s imagination and after two months of
solid houses, the audiences began falling off
rapidly and Street Scene closed after 148
performances, having failed to pay back its
investment.

The antagonistic Rice blamed the
“extravagant” production and the “artiness” of
Weill’s music (which went on to win the first
Tony Award in 1947 for “Best Score”), but the
probable cause of the show’s rapid demise can
be found elsewhere.

One also only has to look at the musicals
which were successful on Broadway during
the year Street Scene made its run for glory. They were either fantasies (Brigadoon and
Finian’s Rainbow) or amiable nostalgic romps
(High Button Shoes and Up In Central Park).

Audiences still smarting from wartime
privation or the loss of loved ones in combat
didn’t want to see a grim drama about a
poverty-stricken tenement that climaxed with
the leading male figure shooting and killing his
adulterous wife and her lover.

There were some crumbs of hope thrown
to the younger generation in the form of a
high school graduation or a jitterbugging
romance, which spawned the show’s one pop
hit, “Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed” (not heard on
this recording). But those few upbeat
moments weren’t quite enough.

And that’s a shame, because there’s a rich
vein of music waiting to be discovered here. After a period of neglect, the show has been
re-discovered in recent years and its broad
theatricality, deep emotion and extravagant
melodic gifts are still waiting to be enjoyed
today.

Richard Ouzounian

Producer’s Note

This version of Street Scene was part of a two-hour concert broadcast live from the Hollywood
Bowl and recorded by the Armed Forces Radio Service, who pressed it on sixteen-inch
transcription discs. Program host Jack Little, not heard here, described the proceedings and
introduced the performers but said nothing about the plot or characters, and in fact we’ve had to
make educated guesses concerning a couple of numbers he did not announce. He also
apologized to the radio audience after the opening number because one microphone failed to
work, leaving the vocal ensemble almost inaudible.

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